[Edaily Reporter Han Kwangbeom ] SKTelecom(017670)has partnered with Upstage, major domestic cybersecurity firms, and academia to develop a specialized AI foundation model for national cybersecurity. The company has made a bold move by assembling a “cybersecurity all-star team” comprising an elite team with proprietary AI model development capabilities and leading cybersecurity firms with hands-on security monitoring expertise.

SKTelecom announced on the 27th that it has submitted an application to participate in the “Development of an AI Foundation Model Specialized for Cybersecurity” project—led by the Ministry of Science and ICT and the National IT Industry Promotion Agency (NIPA)—as part of a consortium.

The core strength of this consortium lies in a structure where world-class AI model development capabilities, real-world security data, and field validation are organically integrated. The process involves an elite team—which has been developing proprietary AI models—building the model, while security firms feed real-world data into the training process; the model is then validated in actual security monitoring environments to further enhance its performance.

SKT, as the lead organization, will oversee the entire consortium and, together with Upstage, take charge of model development. Notably, the two companies are two of the three teams that passed the second evaluation of the Ministry of Science and ICT’s independent AI foundation model project; they plan to pool their proven LLM development capabilities into this initiative.

The two companies will build security-specialized models based on the “A.X K” and “Solar Open” series they have each been developing, respectively, and combine them with AI agents to create a system that automatically performs everything from threat detection to blocking and mitigation.

They have also significantly strengthened their cybersecurity expertise. SKTelecom leverages its know-how in 24/7 monitoring of telecommunications infrastructure and operates an Integrated Security Center comprising 129 staff members reporting directly to the CISO, as well as a “Red Team”—an organization of white-hat hackers. In addition, nine major security companies—including SK Shields, the nation’s leading cybersecurity provider, as well as AHNLAB,INC., SecuI, Igloo Corporation, RaonSecure Co., Ltd., GENIANS, INC., Piolink, Inc., Smart M2M, and Aim Intelligence—have joined the initiative to provide real-world monitoring and threat data and conduct model validation.

To ensure independent verification of results and foster talent, the industry-academic cooperation units of Korea University and Soongsil University are participating, while the Korea Information Security Industry Association (KISIA), which has 350 member companies, is promoting the dissemination of development outcomes throughout the industry and linking them to employee training programs.

Cho Dong-yeon, Head of AI Conversion at SKTelecom, stated, “We will incorporate data and know-how from the domestic security field into domestically developed AI models to create a practical security AI system,” adding, “We will expand the security AI ecosystem so that we can compete in the global market using the capabilities jointly developed by domestic industry, academia, and research institutions.”

Meanwhile, this initiative is a national project led by the Ministry of Science and ICT to counter cyber threats that are becoming increasingly sophisticated due to the proliferation of generative AI and autonomous Agent AI agents. The government plans to select one final project team in early September from the Naver Cloud Consortium and the SKTelecom Consortium—both of which submitted proposals—following a review of document eligibility and presentation evaluations.

The selected team will receive 256 B200 GPUs (32 nodes)—NVIDIA’s latest AI accelerators—for a period of 10 months. The government plans to release an interim model five months after the project begins and, upon completion of development, make the final results available as open source to support the AI transformation of the domestic security industry as a whole.